These are the TAG people who Lively offered to pay the costs of hosting and producing their docs to enable them to produce them, but later could not agree on terms and dates etc.
I thought a little fun thing about this is that his deadline is today, and he filed his letter after hours, at like 9:30 EST. His letter refers to a declaration and nine exhibits, which were not attached. So it was weird when nothing more got filed on the docket until about 15 minutes ago: The declaration!
So he and/or his paralegal have about 45 minutes to get those remaining 9 exhibits filed. Unless there is some lag between CourtListener and Pacer (I haven't noticed that before). Good luck Mr. Breed!
His letter seems pretty reasonable TBH.
I don’t think he’s correct that Lively’s offer to pay the costs of hosting and producing the docs for the production means that the requests as written were overbroad. I think it just means Lively wants a real production with metadata and not a bunch of screen shots of texts.
I do agree it’s overbroad to require texts on which parties are included, and thought Lively agreed not to include those. But then Breed also demanded nothing from after 12/2024 be produced! Liman has already agreed Lively should get communications from after the lawsuit was filed, from the party PR reps, anyway. So I think he’ll be required to produce the later tests.
How is Breed a partner, though? He has filed 9 exhibits showing different parts of the same email string that are all contained, I believe, in the single exhibit that Lively filed. That’s why the attorneys use the one email string over and over in a discovery dispute, so you can just use that one email as your exhibit. Now the judge’s clerk needs to go through these additional 9 exhibits for no reason when Breed could have just cited the already existing filing. Silly and unnecessary.
I also find Breed’s language about “We needn’t, any of us, play at saber rattling” etc to be a bit dramatic in here. Is he British or something? This is federal litigation and Liman has set hard discovery deadlines, with substantial completion due well before Breed’s 21 days would end. Less time on fancy language and more time on compliance would be helpful imho.
Home from end of school pool day with a special present from Judge Liman:
First of all, Lively filed a Reply to Breed's letter, saying hey just because we negotiated down what you might owe (for two months) and you kept asking for more at the last minute doesn't mean the initial subpoena was overburdensome and that having wasted our time for two months you shouldn't be made to comply in full with the subpoena as originally written, now. He notes that the Wayfarer parties (and in fact no parties) have yet produced any materials that provide either of these two people's communications, and the time that Lively might have had one or two months ago to piece together what had been provided by the third parties vs provided by Wayfarer etc. is now passed.
Gottlieb also mentions some juicy sounding emails in here on which these two were copied. The first footnote also side-eyes all nine attachments that Breed attached to his opposition as I noted above, explaining that they were just all the same document that Gottlieb et al had attached to their motion in the first place. He says: "evidence their participation in the retaliatory digital effort: in an email from Abel to Case, Koslow, Heath, and Nathan discussing whether TAG’s fee includes “social media mitigation and proactive fan posting to counter the narrative” (ECF No. 84 ¶ 225), in a text from Case to Matthew Mitchell, Nathan, and Abel regarding contents of “HR complaints” from set (id. ¶ 263), in a text from Abel to Mitchell, Nathan, Case, and Koslow discussing the need to “position” reported-upon HR complaints (id. ¶ 264), and in a text from Abel to Mitchell, Nathan, Case, and Koslow discussing an allegation that Baldoni “invited [a woman] up to his hotel room years ago,” and a text from Koslow in response suggesting to “chat to Jed as well on this” (id. ¶ 256). See Exhibit A (here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.363.1.pdf).
A big part of why the communications broke down on this document collection and production for these two third party TAG employees is because kind of at the last minute, Breen objected to producing docs "to the present" and insisted on stopping when the lawsuit was filed in December 2024. Breen says in the lawyer email chain that they objected to the date in their original objections, but if you look, they really did not. The paragraph with the date specification is "Instructions" paragraph 3, and Breen made no objection to that paragraph. Breen said from the very beginning that paragraphs 11 through 13 of the subpoena seemed reasonable and they could produce those documents, and paragraphs 11-13 even specifically state in the doc request itself that they'll require docs from May 2024 "to the present." Breen made no specific objection to the date range, and said in his email these requests were okay! It's only in the lawyer email communications in late-May/early-June that Breen suddenly objects to producing docs after the lawsuit was filed. In briefing this issue to Judge Liman, Breen doesn't really even try to argue that they objected to the date issue in their Responses and Objections, so while he tried that out on Bender he really didn't test it on the judge.
NAG is suggesting the prior production plan fell through because another Lively lawyer got on the email and rug pulled against the prior terms that had been worked out by Lively attorneys with Breed. This is just incorrect, because Kristen Bender is the Lively attorney who did most of the negotiating, and is on the last several email communications in this string working out the details. The reason communications broke down is in large part because Breed suddenly objected to producing anything after December 2024, out of the blue (and in fact also objects to producing anything between May and July 2024 as well), and that was not acceptable to Lively's attorneys. There is another issue in here about Breed also objecting to producing texts involving group communications involving any of the Baldoni parties, where Bender may have been willing to agree to this at first but after two months had passed with no docs from anyone, they determined they needed everything.
NAG is blaming the communication breakdown on Lively attorneys. While she's saying that's normal in litigation and isn't really a big deal, she's putting the blame for the sudden change on the wrong party. Breed wanted to limit the productions in two new ways at the last minute and Lively/Bender wasn't willing to move. But NAG puts the blame on Bender/Lively instead, which her fans will like more, but which isn't really correct imo.
The judge has already said that on the issue involving the smear, communications after December 2024 are relevant because Lively's complaint states that the smear is ongoing. So unless the judge decided a non-party shouldn't bear the burden here (and except to the extent that any of the third parties are no longer employed by TAG and wouldn't have communications from them to the present), the judge has already said those later docs would be relevant to the case. Order: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.355.0.pdf
Oh wow. Gottlieb is so brilliant, amirite?? You could tell he ‘side eyed’ someone in his footnotes?! Wow. Brilliant analysis. Thank god we have you to explain all this minutiae to us!!
What a great attorney. He encouraged, or at least didn’t discourage, his client who depends on her image for her living and her sense of being, to file a weak weak sexual harassment claim that would surely be put under a microscope and attacked as frivolous, put it in a California complaint so she could leak it to the NYT (risking a huge defamation claim, which she fortunately escaped) and then start engaging in a 2 + year litigation which will drag her name through the press constantly, and cost her millions and millions of dollars in legal fees and PR costs trying to rehabilitate her image. Plus she lost her prized relationship in Taylor Swift and is now isolated.
Wow! So awesome! What a great lawyer!!!! Let’s review how he side eyed someone in a footnote some more. Or focus on how she’s ‘winning’ because she escaped a defamation claim on a legal technicality.
Brilliant!!
Are you all right? I'm just talking about the filings that relate to the hearing coming up tomorrow. I guess you're saying that overall this lawsuit was bad for Lively, and I understand how you feel that way. On the other hand, your boy (I think he's surfing in Florida now?) just got all of his own claims dismissed. *poof* My favorite part of your point above is where you say his defamation claim was dismissed "on a legal technicality" lol. If that is how you need to cope, okay.
You seem to be dismissing all of the little back and forth letters and motions that go into litigation like this as unimportant given the larger picture. The day-to-day activity of the legal filings is mostly what interests me in this thread, so that's mostly what I post about. Coincidentally, I also think that's the part of litigation that Freedman is pretty terrible at. Freedman isn't involved in these Breen filings, but Breen is an appropriate stand in for him here ha. Freedman may be good at bullying and PR and maybe even depositions (let's see if that happens today), but he doesn't seem to be very good at motions practice or pleadings -- to me it's almost getting close to looking like malpractice at this point given his choice to file a worthless defamation claim that subjects his clients to treble damages, punitives, and attorneys fees as well as multiple various outstanding Rule 11 sanctions motions. I'm not sure Lively's attorneys will win on all of these, but I bet they will win some, and that's more cash Baldoni's rich benefactor will wind up paying out to Lively in this case.
Look, we all get it. The actual case for lively is such a train wreck and money pit that you need to focus on all the little filings here and there, and then of course the defamation claim. Baldoni doesn’t want money out of this, he wanted his reputation cleared and he has done that in spades. And yes, most people believe lively and the NYT won their cases because of fair report privilege, not because livelys claims were valid.
You’re acting like Baldoni started this and lost. Whereas, NO, Lively started this and although she seems to have avoided huge direct personal financial liability, she has decimated her reputation and is absolutely bleeding money. All for a pointless law suit that has done nothing but make her look like a manipulative liar. You can’t actually think that’s ‘winning’ can you?
How you can continuously come in here and claim the court case is going GREAT for Baldoni when he keeps losing motion after motion is bizarre to me. I guess since Freedman keeps going on TV saying he didn’t really lose at all or lost less then he really did keeps confusing people like you.
Let’s see how many claims are in the amended complaint Freedman files today as a starting point lol.
It had seemed to me that Baldoni had actually wanted quite a large sum of money out of this lawsuit since he filed a $400M defamation claim. But since those claims were dismissed as baseless I guess you’re rewriting history again.
Dp, but the recent discovery motions have been a mixed bag for Lively, she was forced to give up her claims for intentional I flictionof emotional distress and outright lost the Swift motion. She had some success in ipushing out the end dare on the other discovery and getting some responses to interrogatories.
Just a little reminder that another recent thing that happened in the case was Judge Liman dismissing every single one of Baldoni's claims, mostly with prejudice, on this day only two weeks ago. *pours out a forty for those $400M defamation and extortion claims RIP*
Well yes, but Lively has also lost some claims.
lol!! Voluntarily. Because she didn't want to give her alleged harasser her medical records. Not because her claims were legally insufficient. As all of Baldoni's claims were found to be. Baldoni was told none of his claims passed the smell test, whereas on the ED claim Lively just said "nah I'm good, you can have these back."
Let me fix this for you— Blake had no medical records to support her claims for intentional infliction of emotional distress and was forced to drop them.
Given the history we've seen in this case, where Gottlieb generally only files pleadings where he has the receipts to back them up whereas Freedman just files whatever hopes and dreams he wants despite their failure to conform to docket and pleadings requirements in federal courts, I'm going to go with Gottlieb here. Gottlieb's discovery requests may sometimes be overbroad or ask for too much, but he hasn't ever been caught out filing total nonsense like Freedman has now several times. So, no -- I'm pretty sure Lively had medical records to back up her emotional distress claims, but just didn't want to give them as ammunition to her alleged harasser and smearer to find them distorted in some Daily Mail article within the week. A++ decision, Gottlieb. Good call. And you can tell how good of a call it was by how hard Freedman fought to get the med records (rather than have the claims struck). Aww, poor Bryan.
This from the side that claimed Blake got everything she wanted with respect to attorney’s eyes protection in the protective order which does include medical records. Indeed, her attorneys specifically brought up medical records records in their oral argument.
Can’t have it both ways— everyone knows that Freedman can’t release anything marked AEO. Blake didn’t have the goods.
Nah, given that Johnny Depp used Amber Heard's medical records and the psych "expert" that he paid to argue to the jury that Heard had a host of mental illnesses including borderline personality disorder, this was just Gottlieb being smart. And if you don't think Freedman is feeding confidential information to news outlets and that's how they are publishing stories within minutes of hitting the docket, I have some beautiful bridges to sell you.
I haven't seen any news today on whether Lively's deposition actually did or did not happen.
Brett Douglass McDowell has now made his third filing of the day, this one a motion for reconsideration of the denial of his motion to intervene. It's not available via Court Listener, but I feel that is just as well.
In which case, don’t include the claims to begin with, or don’t seek a protective order for attorney’s eyes only treatment of medical records. I mean, you literally spent dozens of pages crowing about what a victory the protective order was for Blake. Now, when she can’t produce the goods, you try to blame it on lack of protection of the evidence. It’s laughable and pathetic.
These are the TAG people who Lively offered to pay the costs of hosting and producing their docs to enable them to produce them, but later could not agree on terms and dates etc.
I thought a little fun thing about this is that his deadline is today, and he filed his letter after hours, at like 9:30 EST. His letter refers to a declaration and nine exhibits, which were not attached. So it was weird when nothing more got filed on the docket until about 15 minutes ago: The declaration!
So he and/or his paralegal have about 45 minutes to get those remaining 9 exhibits filed. Unless there is some lag between CourtListener and Pacer (I haven't noticed that before). Good luck Mr. Breed!
His letter seems pretty reasonable TBH.
I don’t think he’s correct that Lively’s offer to pay the costs of hosting and producing the docs for the production means that the requests as written were overbroad. I think it just means Lively wants a real production with metadata and not a bunch of screen shots of texts.
I do agree it’s overbroad to require texts on which parties are included, and thought Lively agreed not to include those. But then Breed also demanded nothing from after 12/2024 be produced! Liman has already agreed Lively should get communications from after the lawsuit was filed, from the party PR reps, anyway. So I think he’ll be required to produce the later tests.
How is Breed a partner, though? He has filed 9 exhibits showing different parts of the same email string that are all contained, I believe, in the single exhibit that Lively filed. That’s why the attorneys use the one email string over and over in a discovery dispute, so you can just use that one email as your exhibit. Now the judge’s clerk needs to go through these additional 9 exhibits for no reason when Breed could have just cited the already existing filing. Silly and unnecessary.
I also find Breed’s language about “We needn’t, any of us, play at saber rattling” etc to be a bit dramatic in here. Is he British or something? This is federal litigation and Liman has set hard discovery deadlines, with substantial completion due well before Breed’s 21 days would end. Less time on fancy language and more time on compliance would be helpful imho.
Home from end of school pool day with a special present from Judge Liman:
First of all, Lively filed a Reply to Breed's letter, saying hey just because we negotiated down what you might owe (for two months) and you kept asking for more at the last minute doesn't mean the initial subpoena was overburdensome and that having wasted our time for two months you shouldn't be made to comply in full with the subpoena as originally written, now. He notes that the Wayfarer parties (and in fact no parties) have yet produced any materials that provide either of these two people's communications, and the time that Lively might have had one or two months ago to piece together what had been provided by the third parties vs provided by Wayfarer etc. is now passed.
Gottlieb also mentions some juicy sounding emails in here on which these two were copied. The first footnote also side-eyes all nine attachments that Breed attached to his opposition as I noted above, explaining that they were just all the same document that Gottlieb et al had attached to their motion in the first place. He says: "evidence their participation in the retaliatory digital effort: in an email from Abel to Case, Koslow, Heath, and Nathan discussing whether TAG’s fee includes “social media mitigation and proactive fan posting to counter the narrative” (ECF No. 84 ¶ 225), in a text from Case to Matthew Mitchell, Nathan, and Abel regarding contents of “HR complaints” from set (id. ¶ 263), in a text from Abel to Mitchell, Nathan, Case, and Koslow discussing the need to “position” reported-upon HR complaints (id. ¶ 264), and in a text from Abel to Mitchell, Nathan, Case, and Koslow discussing an allegation that Baldoni “invited [a woman] up to his hotel room years ago,” and a text from Koslow in response suggesting to “chat to Jed as well on this” (id. ¶ 256). See Exhibit A (here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.363.1.pdf).
A big part of why the communications broke down on this document collection and production for these two third party TAG employees is because kind of at the last minute, Breen objected to producing docs "to the present" and insisted on stopping when the lawsuit was filed in December 2024. Breen says in the lawyer email chain that they objected to the date in their original objections, but if you look, they really did not. The paragraph with the date specification is "Instructions" paragraph 3, and Breen made no objection to that paragraph. Breen said from the very beginning that paragraphs 11 through 13 of the subpoena seemed reasonable and they could produce those documents, and paragraphs 11-13 even specifically state in the doc request itself that they'll require docs from May 2024 "to the present." Breen made no specific objection to the date range, and said in his email these requests were okay! It's only in the lawyer email communications in late-May/early-June that Breen suddenly objects to producing docs after the lawsuit was filed. In briefing this issue to Judge Liman, Breen doesn't really even try to argue that they objected to the date issue in their Responses and Objections, so while he tried that out on Bender he really didn't test it on the judge.
NAG is suggesting the prior production plan fell through because another Lively lawyer got on the email and rug pulled against the prior terms that had been worked out by Lively attorneys with Breed. This is just incorrect, because Kristen Bender is the Lively attorney who did most of the negotiating, and is on the last several email communications in this string working out the details. The reason communications broke down is in large part because Breed suddenly objected to producing anything after December 2024, out of the blue (and in fact also objects to producing anything between May and July 2024 as well), and that was not acceptable to Lively's attorneys. There is another issue in here about Breed also objecting to producing texts involving group communications involving any of the Baldoni parties, where Bender may have been willing to agree to this at first but after two months had passed with no docs from anyone, they determined they needed everything.
NAG is blaming the communication breakdown on Lively attorneys. While she's saying that's normal in litigation and isn't really a big deal, she's putting the blame for the sudden change on the wrong party. Breed wanted to limit the productions in two new ways at the last minute and Lively/Bender wasn't willing to move. But NAG puts the blame on Bender/Lively instead, which her fans will like more, but which isn't really correct imo.
The judge has already said that on the issue involving the smear, communications after December 2024 are relevant because Lively's complaint states that the smear is ongoing. So unless the judge decided a non-party shouldn't bear the burden here (and except to the extent that any of the third parties are no longer employed by TAG and wouldn't have communications from them to the present), the judge has already said those later docs would be relevant to the case. Order: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.355.0.pdf
Oh wow. Gottlieb is so brilliant, amirite?? You could tell he ‘side eyed’ someone in his footnotes?! Wow. Brilliant analysis. Thank god we have you to explain all this minutiae to us!!
What a great attorney. He encouraged, or at least didn’t discourage, his client who depends on her image for her living and her sense of being, to file a weak weak sexual harassment claim that would surely be put under a microscope and attacked as frivolous, put it in a California complaint so she could leak it to the NYT (risking a huge defamation claim, which she fortunately escaped) and then start engaging in a 2 + year litigation which will drag her name through the press constantly, and cost her millions and millions of dollars in legal fees and PR costs trying to rehabilitate her image. Plus she lost her prized relationship in Taylor Swift and is now isolated.
Wow! So awesome! What a great lawyer!!!! Let’s review how he side eyed someone in a footnote some more. Or focus on how she’s ‘winning’ because she escaped a defamation claim on a legal technicality.
Brilliant!!
Are you all right? I'm just talking about the filings that relate to the hearing coming up tomorrow. I guess you're saying that overall this lawsuit was bad for Lively, and I understand how you feel that way. On the other hand, your boy (I think he's surfing in Florida now?) just got all of his own claims dismissed. *poof* My favorite part of your point above is where you say his defamation claim was dismissed "on a legal technicality" lol. If that is how you need to cope, okay.
You seem to be dismissing all of the little back and forth letters and motions that go into litigation like this as unimportant given the larger picture. The day-to-day activity of the legal filings is mostly what interests me in this thread, so that's mostly what I post about. Coincidentally, I also think that's the part of litigation that Freedman is pretty terrible at. Freedman isn't involved in these Breen filings, but Breen is an appropriate stand in for him here ha. Freedman may be good at bullying and PR and maybe even depositions (let's see if that happens today), but he doesn't seem to be very good at motions practice or pleadings -- to me it's almost getting close to looking like malpractice at this point given his choice to file a worthless defamation claim that subjects his clients to treble damages, punitives, and attorneys fees as well as multiple various outstanding Rule 11 sanctions motions. I'm not sure Lively's attorneys will win on all of these, but I bet they will win some, and that's more cash Baldoni's rich benefactor will wind up paying out to Lively in this case.
Look, we all get it. The actual case for lively is such a train wreck and money pit that you need to focus on all the little filings here and there, and then of course the defamation claim. Baldoni doesn’t want money out of this, he wanted his reputation cleared and he has done that in spades. And yes, most people believe lively and the NYT won their cases because of fair report privilege, not because livelys claims were valid.
You’re acting like Baldoni started this and lost. Whereas, NO, Lively started this and although she seems to have avoided huge direct personal financial liability, she has decimated her reputation and is absolutely bleeding money. All for a pointless law suit that has done nothing but make her look like a manipulative liar. You can’t actually think that’s ‘winning’ can you?
How you can continuously come in here and claim the court case is going GREAT for Baldoni when he keeps losing motion after motion is bizarre to me. I guess since Freedman keeps going on TV saying he didn’t really lose at all or lost less then he really did keeps confusing people like you.
Let’s see how many claims are in the amended complaint Freedman files today as a starting point lol.
It had seemed to me that Baldoni had actually wanted quite a large sum of money out of this lawsuit since he filed a $400M defamation claim. But since those claims were dismissed as baseless I guess you’re rewriting history again.
Dp, but the recent discovery motions have been a mixed bag for Lively, she was forced to give up her claims for intentional I flictionof emotional distress and outright lost the Swift motion. She had some success in ipushing out the end dare on the other discovery and getting some responses to interrogatories.
Just a little reminder that another recent thing that happened in the case was Judge Liman dismissing every single one of Baldoni's claims, mostly with prejudice, on this day only two weeks ago. *pours out a forty for those $400M defamation and extortion claims RIP*
Well yes, but Lively has also lost some claims.
lol!! Voluntarily. Because she didn't want to give her alleged harasser her medical records. Not because her claims were legally insufficient. As all of Baldoni's claims were found to be. Baldoni was told none of his claims passed the smell test, whereas on the ED claim Lively just said "nah I'm good, you can have these back."
Let me fix this for you— Blake had no medical records to support her claims for intentional infliction of emotional distress and was forced to drop them.
Given the history we've seen in this case, where Gottlieb generally only files pleadings where he has the receipts to back them up whereas Freedman just files whatever hopes and dreams he wants despite their failure to conform to docket and pleadings requirements in federal courts, I'm going to go with Gottlieb here. Gottlieb's discovery requests may sometimes be overbroad or ask for too much, but he hasn't ever been caught out filing total nonsense like Freedman has now several times. So, no -- I'm pretty sure Lively had medical records to back up her emotional distress claims, but just didn't want to give them as ammunition to her alleged harasser and smearer to find them distorted in some Daily Mail article within the week. A++ decision, Gottlieb. Good call. And you can tell how good of a call it was by how hard Freedman fought to get the med records (rather than have the claims struck). Aww, poor Bryan.
This from the side that claimed Blake got everything she wanted with respect to attorney’s eyes protection in the protective order which does include medical records. Indeed, her attorneys specifically brought up medical records records in their oral argument.
Can’t have it both ways— everyone knows that Freedman can’t release anything marked AEO. Blake didn’t have the goods.
Nah, given that Johnny Depp used Amber Heard's medical records and the psych "expert" that he paid to argue to the jury that Heard had a host of mental illnesses including borderline personality disorder, this was just Gottlieb being smart. And if you don't think Freedman is feeding confidential information to news outlets and that's how they are publishing stories within minutes of hitting the docket, I have some beautiful bridges to sell you.
I haven't seen any news today on whether Lively's deposition actually did or did not happen.
Brett Douglass McDowell has now made his third filing of the day, this one a motion for reconsideration of the denial of his motion to intervene. It's not available via Court Listener, but I feel that is just as well.
In which case, don’t include the claims to begin with, or don’t seek a protective order for attorney’s eyes only treatment of medical records. I mean, you literally spent dozens of pages crowing about what a victory the protective order was for Blake. Now, when she can’t produce the goods, you try to blame it on lack of protection of the evidence. It’s laughable and pathetic.
I just don't think Gottlieb could have predicted that Freedman would have been this crazy or ridiculous for such a prolonged period of time. And this is Gottlieb, who is currently representing Drake in the biggest rap beef legal battle of all time, and having little problems with co-counsel there. While meanwhile the lawyer for Justin effin Baldoni is accusing co-counsel of extortion, filing multiple pleadings that get struck, and getting sanctions and attorneys fees motions filed against him lol. And Baldoni fans think the problem here is Michael Gottlieb, the guy that got Rudy Giuliani convicted of defamation against two poll workers before Liman and knows how to behave with this judge? Baldoni supporters have now been completely disconnected from reality for some time.
Anonymous wrote:Baldoni should hire the McDowell guy. He's more active than Freedman. I'm sure he would have filed MTD and SAC.
It turns out you dont even need to file a motion to dismiss with Blake, ask her for proof and she drops claims.
Here's a hint the next time you file a complaint: You're supposed to have at least a little bit of proof to back up your claims before you file them. Federal court is not actually a fishing expedition. Mr. Freedman has many years of experience but still hasn't learned this one simple little trick and notoriously uses discovery as a fishing expedition to back wild and unsubstantiated claims. Not this time, sorry not sorry.
Anonymous wrote:Baldoni should hire the McDowell guy. He's more active than Freedman. I'm sure he would have filed MTD and SAC.
It turns out you dont even need to file a motion to dismiss with Blake, ask her for proof and she drops claims.
Here's a hint the next time you file a complaint: You're supposed to have at least a little bit of proof to back up your claims before you file them. Federal court is not actually a fishing expedition. Mr. Freedman has many years of experience but still hasn't learned this one simple little trick and notoriously uses discovery as a fishing expedition to back wild and unsubstantiated claims. Not this time, sorry not sorry.
I'm often sympathetic to Lively, but, this is kind of unfair considering she got all of that proof under the table with the Vanzan lawsuit, without any notice to the defendants or any opportunity to fight the scope of the subpoena.
These are the TAG people who Lively offered to pay the costs of hosting and producing their docs to enable them to produce them, but later could not agree on terms and dates etc.
I thought a little fun thing about this is that his deadline is today, and he filed his letter after hours, at like 9:30 EST. His letter refers to a declaration and nine exhibits, which were not attached. So it was weird when nothing more got filed on the docket until about 15 minutes ago: The declaration!
So he and/or his paralegal have about 45 minutes to get those remaining 9 exhibits filed. Unless there is some lag between CourtListener and Pacer (I haven't noticed that before). Good luck Mr. Breed!
His letter seems pretty reasonable TBH.
I don’t think he’s correct that Lively’s offer to pay the costs of hosting and producing the docs for the production means that the requests as written were overbroad. I think it just means Lively wants a real production with metadata and not a bunch of screen shots of texts.
I do agree it’s overbroad to require texts on which parties are included, and thought Lively agreed not to include those. But then Breed also demanded nothing from after 12/2024 be produced! Liman has already agreed Lively should get communications from after the lawsuit was filed, from the party PR reps, anyway. So I think he’ll be required to produce the later tests.
How is Breed a partner, though? He has filed 9 exhibits showing different parts of the same email string that are all contained, I believe, in the single exhibit that Lively filed. That’s why the attorneys use the one email string over and over in a discovery dispute, so you can just use that one email as your exhibit. Now the judge’s clerk needs to go through these additional 9 exhibits for no reason when Breed could have just cited the already existing filing. Silly and unnecessary.
I also find Breed’s language about “We needn’t, any of us, play at saber rattling” etc to be a bit dramatic in here. Is he British or something? This is federal litigation and Liman has set hard discovery deadlines, with substantial completion due well before Breed’s 21 days would end. Less time on fancy language and more time on compliance would be helpful imho.
Home from end of school pool day with a special present from Judge Liman:
First of all, Lively filed a Reply to Breed's letter, saying hey just because we negotiated down what you might owe (for two months) and you kept asking for more at the last minute doesn't mean the initial subpoena was overburdensome and that having wasted our time for two months you shouldn't be made to comply in full with the subpoena as originally written, now. He notes that the Wayfarer parties (and in fact no parties) have yet produced any materials that provide either of these two people's communications, and the time that Lively might have had one or two months ago to piece together what had been provided by the third parties vs provided by Wayfarer etc. is now passed.
Gottlieb also mentions some juicy sounding emails in here on which these two were copied. The first footnote also side-eyes all nine attachments that Breed attached to his opposition as I noted above, explaining that they were just all the same document that Gottlieb et al had attached to their motion in the first place. He says: "evidence their participation in the retaliatory digital effort: in an email from Abel to Case, Koslow, Heath, and Nathan discussing whether TAG’s fee includes “social media mitigation and proactive fan posting to counter the narrative” (ECF No. 84 ¶ 225), in a text from Case to Matthew Mitchell, Nathan, and Abel regarding contents of “HR complaints” from set (id. ¶ 263), in a text from Abel to Mitchell, Nathan, Case, and Koslow discussing the need to “position” reported-upon HR complaints (id. ¶ 264), and in a text from Abel to Mitchell, Nathan, Case, and Koslow discussing an allegation that Baldoni “invited [a woman] up to his hotel room years ago,” and a text from Koslow in response suggesting to “chat to Jed as well on this” (id. ¶ 256). See Exhibit A (here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.363.1.pdf).
A big part of why the communications broke down on this document collection and production for these two third party TAG employees is because kind of at the last minute, Breen objected to producing docs "to the present" and insisted on stopping when the lawsuit was filed in December 2024. Breen says in the lawyer email chain that they objected to the date in their original objections, but if you look, they really did not. The paragraph with the date specification is "Instructions" paragraph 3, and Breen made no objection to that paragraph. Breen said from the very beginning that paragraphs 11 through 13 of the subpoena seemed reasonable and they could produce those documents, and paragraphs 11-13 even specifically state in the doc request itself that they'll require docs from May 2024 "to the present." Breen made no specific objection to the date range, and said in his email these requests were okay! It's only in the lawyer email communications in late-May/early-June that Breen suddenly objects to producing docs after the lawsuit was filed. In briefing this issue to Judge Liman, Breen doesn't really even try to argue that they objected to the date issue in their Responses and Objections, so while he tried that out on Bender he really didn't test it on the judge.
NAG is suggesting the prior production plan fell through because another Lively lawyer got on the email and rug pulled against the prior terms that had been worked out by Lively attorneys with Breed. This is just incorrect, because Kristen Bender is the Lively attorney who did most of the negotiating, and is on the last several email communications in this string working out the details. The reason communications broke down is in large part because Breed suddenly objected to producing anything after December 2024, out of the blue (and in fact also objects to producing anything between May and July 2024 as well), and that was not acceptable to Lively's attorneys. There is another issue in here about Breed also objecting to producing texts involving group communications involving any of the Baldoni parties, where Bender may have been willing to agree to this at first but after two months had passed with no docs from anyone, they determined they needed everything.
NAG is blaming the communication breakdown on Lively attorneys. While she's saying that's normal in litigation and isn't really a big deal, she's putting the blame for the sudden change on the wrong party. Breed wanted to limit the productions in two new ways at the last minute and Lively/Bender wasn't willing to move. But NAG puts the blame on Bender/Lively instead, which her fans will like more, but which isn't really correct imo.
The judge has already said that on the issue involving the smear, communications after December 2024 are relevant because Lively's complaint states that the smear is ongoing. So unless the judge decided a non-party shouldn't bear the burden here (and except to the extent that any of the third parties are no longer employed by TAG and wouldn't have communications from them to the present), the judge has already said those later docs would be relevant to the case. Order: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.355.0.pdf
Oh wow. Gottlieb is so brilliant, amirite?? You could tell he ‘side eyed’ someone in his footnotes?! Wow. Brilliant analysis. Thank god we have you to explain all this minutiae to us!!
What a great attorney. He encouraged, or at least didn’t discourage, his client who depends on her image for her living and her sense of being, to file a weak weak sexual harassment claim that would surely be put under a microscope and attacked as frivolous, put it in a California complaint so she could leak it to the NYT (risking a huge defamation claim, which she fortunately escaped) and then start engaging in a 2 + year litigation which will drag her name through the press constantly, and cost her millions and millions of dollars in legal fees and PR costs trying to rehabilitate her image. Plus she lost her prized relationship in Taylor Swift and is now isolated.
Wow! So awesome! What a great lawyer!!!! Let’s review how he side eyed someone in a footnote some more. Or focus on how she’s ‘winning’ because she escaped a defamation claim on a legal technicality.
Brilliant!!
Are you all right? I'm just talking about the filings that relate to the hearing coming up tomorrow. I guess you're saying that overall this lawsuit was bad for Lively, and I understand how you feel that way. On the other hand, your boy (I think he's surfing in Florida now?) just got all of his own claims dismissed. *poof* My favorite part of your point above is where you say his defamation claim was dismissed "on a legal technicality" lol. If that is how you need to cope, okay.
You seem to be dismissing all of the little back and forth letters and motions that go into litigation like this as unimportant given the larger picture. The day-to-day activity of the legal filings is mostly what interests me in this thread, so that's mostly what I post about. Coincidentally, I also think that's the part of litigation that Freedman is pretty terrible at. Freedman isn't involved in these Breen filings, but Breen is an appropriate stand in for him here ha. Freedman may be good at bullying and PR and maybe even depositions (let's see if that happens today), but he doesn't seem to be very good at motions practice or pleadings -- to me it's almost getting close to looking like malpractice at this point given his choice to file a worthless defamation claim that subjects his clients to treble damages, punitives, and attorneys fees as well as multiple various outstanding Rule 11 sanctions motions. I'm not sure Lively's attorneys will win on all of these, but I bet they will win some, and that's more cash Baldoni's rich benefactor will wind up paying out to Lively in this case.
Look, we all get it. The actual case for lively is such a train wreck and money pit that you need to focus on all the little filings here and there, and then of course the defamation claim. Baldoni doesn’t want money out of this, he wanted his reputation cleared and he has done that in spades. And yes, most people believe lively and the NYT won their cases because of fair report privilege, not because livelys claims were valid.
You’re acting like Baldoni started this and lost. Whereas, NO, Lively started this and although she seems to have avoided huge direct personal financial liability, she has decimated her reputation and is absolutely bleeding money. All for a pointless law suit that has done nothing but make her look like a manipulative liar. You can’t actually think that’s ‘winning’ can you?
How you can continuously come in here and claim the court case is going GREAT for Baldoni when he keeps losing motion after motion is bizarre to me. I guess since Freedman keeps going on TV saying he didn’t really lose at all or lost less then he really did keeps confusing people like you.
Let’s see how many claims are in the amended complaint Freedman files today as a starting point lol.
It had seemed to me that Baldoni had actually wanted quite a large sum of money out of this lawsuit since he filed a $400M defamation claim. But since those claims were dismissed as baseless I guess you’re rewriting history again.
Dp, but the recent discovery motions have been a mixed bag for Lively, she was forced to give up her claims for intentional I flictionof emotional distress and outright lost the Swift motion. She had some success in ipushing out the end dare on the other discovery and getting some responses to interrogatories.
Just a little reminder that another recent thing that happened in the case was Judge Liman dismissing every single one of Baldoni's claims, mostly with prejudice, on this day only two weeks ago. *pours out a forty for those $400M defamation and extortion claims RIP*
Well yes, but Lively has also lost some claims.
lol!! Voluntarily. Because she didn't want to give her alleged harasser her medical records. Not because her claims were legally insufficient. As all of Baldoni's claims were found to be. Baldoni was told none of his claims passed the smell test, whereas on the ED claim Lively just said "nah I'm good, you can have these back."
Let me fix this for you— Blake had no medical records to support her claims for intentional infliction of emotional distress and was forced to drop them.
Given the history we've seen in this case, where Gottlieb generally only files pleadings where he has the receipts to back them up whereas Freedman just files whatever hopes and dreams he wants despite their failure to conform to docket and pleadings requirements in federal courts, I'm going to go with Gottlieb here. Gottlieb's discovery requests may sometimes be overbroad or ask for too much, but he hasn't ever been caught out filing total nonsense like Freedman has now several times. So, no -- I'm pretty sure Lively had medical records to back up her emotional distress claims, but just didn't want to give them as ammunition to her alleged harasser and smearer to find them distorted in some Daily Mail article within the week. A++ decision, Gottlieb. Good call. And you can tell how good of a call it was by how hard Freedman fought to get the med records (rather than have the claims struck). Aww, poor Bryan.
This from the side that claimed Blake got everything she wanted with respect to attorney’s eyes protection in the protective order which does include medical records. Indeed, her attorneys specifically brought up medical records records in their oral argument.
Can’t have it both ways— everyone knows that Freedman can’t release anything marked AEO. Blake didn’t have the goods.
Nah, given that Johnny Depp used Amber Heard's medical records and the psych "expert" that he paid to argue to the jury that Heard had a host of mental illnesses including borderline personality disorder, this was just Gottlieb being smart. And if you don't think Freedman is feeding confidential information to news outlets and that's how they are publishing stories within minutes of hitting the docket, I have some beautiful bridges to sell you.
I haven't seen any news today on whether Lively's deposition actually did or did not happen.
Brett Douglass McDowell has now made his third filing of the day, this one a motion for reconsideration of the denial of his motion to intervene. It's not available via Court Listener, but I feel that is just as well.
In which case, don’t include the claims to begin with, or don’t seek a protective order for attorney’s eyes only treatment of medical records. I mean, you literally spent dozens of pages crowing about what a victory the protective order was for Blake. Now, when she can’t produce the goods, you try to blame it on lack of protection of the evidence. It’s laughable and pathetic.
I just don't think Gottlieb could have predicted that Freedman would have been this crazy or ridiculous for such a prolonged period of time. And this is Gottlieb, who is currently representing Drake in the biggest rap beef legal battle of all time, and having little problems with co-counsel there. While meanwhile the lawyer for Justin effin Baldoni is accusing co-counsel of extortion, filing multiple pleadings that get struck, and getting sanctions and attorneys fees motions filed against him lol. And Baldoni fans think the problem here is Michael Gottlieb, the guy that got Rudy Giuliani convicted of defamation against two poll workers before Liman and knows how to behave with this judge? Baldoni supporters have now been completely disconnected from reality for some time.
Is there a point in here somewhere or just more of your weird Freedman personalization babbling?
These are the TAG people who Lively offered to pay the costs of hosting and producing their docs to enable them to produce them, but later could not agree on terms and dates etc.
I thought a little fun thing about this is that his deadline is today, and he filed his letter after hours, at like 9:30 EST. His letter refers to a declaration and nine exhibits, which were not attached. So it was weird when nothing more got filed on the docket until about 15 minutes ago: The declaration!
So he and/or his paralegal have about 45 minutes to get those remaining 9 exhibits filed. Unless there is some lag between CourtListener and Pacer (I haven't noticed that before). Good luck Mr. Breed!
His letter seems pretty reasonable TBH.
I don’t think he’s correct that Lively’s offer to pay the costs of hosting and producing the docs for the production means that the requests as written were overbroad. I think it just means Lively wants a real production with metadata and not a bunch of screen shots of texts.
I do agree it’s overbroad to require texts on which parties are included, and thought Lively agreed not to include those. But then Breed also demanded nothing from after 12/2024 be produced! Liman has already agreed Lively should get communications from after the lawsuit was filed, from the party PR reps, anyway. So I think he’ll be required to produce the later tests.
How is Breed a partner, though? He has filed 9 exhibits showing different parts of the same email string that are all contained, I believe, in the single exhibit that Lively filed. That’s why the attorneys use the one email string over and over in a discovery dispute, so you can just use that one email as your exhibit. Now the judge’s clerk needs to go through these additional 9 exhibits for no reason when Breed could have just cited the already existing filing. Silly and unnecessary.
I also find Breed’s language about “We needn’t, any of us, play at saber rattling” etc to be a bit dramatic in here. Is he British or something? This is federal litigation and Liman has set hard discovery deadlines, with substantial completion due well before Breed’s 21 days would end. Less time on fancy language and more time on compliance would be helpful imho.
Home from end of school pool day with a special present from Judge Liman:
First of all, Lively filed a Reply to Breed's letter, saying hey just because we negotiated down what you might owe (for two months) and you kept asking for more at the last minute doesn't mean the initial subpoena was overburdensome and that having wasted our time for two months you shouldn't be made to comply in full with the subpoena as originally written, now. He notes that the Wayfarer parties (and in fact no parties) have yet produced any materials that provide either of these two people's communications, and the time that Lively might have had one or two months ago to piece together what had been provided by the third parties vs provided by Wayfarer etc. is now passed.
Gottlieb also mentions some juicy sounding emails in here on which these two were copied. The first footnote also side-eyes all nine attachments that Breed attached to his opposition as I noted above, explaining that they were just all the same document that Gottlieb et al had attached to their motion in the first place. He says: "evidence their participation in the retaliatory digital effort: in an email from Abel to Case, Koslow, Heath, and Nathan discussing whether TAG’s fee includes “social media mitigation and proactive fan posting to counter the narrative” (ECF No. 84 ¶ 225), in a text from Case to Matthew Mitchell, Nathan, and Abel regarding contents of “HR complaints” from set (id. ¶ 263), in a text from Abel to Mitchell, Nathan, Case, and Koslow discussing the need to “position” reported-upon HR complaints (id. ¶ 264), and in a text from Abel to Mitchell, Nathan, Case, and Koslow discussing an allegation that Baldoni “invited [a woman] up to his hotel room years ago,” and a text from Koslow in response suggesting to “chat to Jed as well on this” (id. ¶ 256). See Exhibit A (here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.363.1.pdf).
A big part of why the communications broke down on this document collection and production for these two third party TAG employees is because kind of at the last minute, Breen objected to producing docs "to the present" and insisted on stopping when the lawsuit was filed in December 2024. Breen says in the lawyer email chain that they objected to the date in their original objections, but if you look, they really did not. The paragraph with the date specification is "Instructions" paragraph 3, and Breen made no objection to that paragraph. Breen said from the very beginning that paragraphs 11 through 13 of the subpoena seemed reasonable and they could produce those documents, and paragraphs 11-13 even specifically state in the doc request itself that they'll require docs from May 2024 "to the present." Breen made no specific objection to the date range, and said in his email these requests were okay! It's only in the lawyer email communications in late-May/early-June that Breen suddenly objects to producing docs after the lawsuit was filed. In briefing this issue to Judge Liman, Breen doesn't really even try to argue that they objected to the date issue in their Responses and Objections, so while he tried that out on Bender he really didn't test it on the judge.
NAG is suggesting the prior production plan fell through because another Lively lawyer got on the email and rug pulled against the prior terms that had been worked out by Lively attorneys with Breed. This is just incorrect, because Kristen Bender is the Lively attorney who did most of the negotiating, and is on the last several email communications in this string working out the details. The reason communications broke down is in large part because Breed suddenly objected to producing anything after December 2024, out of the blue (and in fact also objects to producing anything between May and July 2024 as well), and that was not acceptable to Lively's attorneys. There is another issue in here about Breed also objecting to producing texts involving group communications involving any of the Baldoni parties, where Bender may have been willing to agree to this at first but after two months had passed with no docs from anyone, they determined they needed everything.
NAG is blaming the communication breakdown on Lively attorneys. While she's saying that's normal in litigation and isn't really a big deal, she's putting the blame for the sudden change on the wrong party. Breed wanted to limit the productions in two new ways at the last minute and Lively/Bender wasn't willing to move. But NAG puts the blame on Bender/Lively instead, which her fans will like more, but which isn't really correct imo.
The judge has already said that on the issue involving the smear, communications after December 2024 are relevant because Lively's complaint states that the smear is ongoing. So unless the judge decided a non-party shouldn't bear the burden here (and except to the extent that any of the third parties are no longer employed by TAG and wouldn't have communications from them to the present), the judge has already said those later docs would be relevant to the case. Order: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.355.0.pdf
Oh wow. Gottlieb is so brilliant, amirite?? You could tell he ‘side eyed’ someone in his footnotes?! Wow. Brilliant analysis. Thank god we have you to explain all this minutiae to us!!
What a great attorney. He encouraged, or at least didn’t discourage, his client who depends on her image for her living and her sense of being, to file a weak weak sexual harassment claim that would surely be put under a microscope and attacked as frivolous, put it in a California complaint so she could leak it to the NYT (risking a huge defamation claim, which she fortunately escaped) and then start engaging in a 2 + year litigation which will drag her name through the press constantly, and cost her millions and millions of dollars in legal fees and PR costs trying to rehabilitate her image. Plus she lost her prized relationship in Taylor Swift and is now isolated.
Wow! So awesome! What a great lawyer!!!! Let’s review how he side eyed someone in a footnote some more. Or focus on how she’s ‘winning’ because she escaped a defamation claim on a legal technicality.
Brilliant!!
Are you all right? I'm just talking about the filings that relate to the hearing coming up tomorrow. I guess you're saying that overall this lawsuit was bad for Lively, and I understand how you feel that way. On the other hand, your boy (I think he's surfing in Florida now?) just got all of his own claims dismissed. *poof* My favorite part of your point above is where you say his defamation claim was dismissed "on a legal technicality" lol. If that is how you need to cope, okay.
You seem to be dismissing all of the little back and forth letters and motions that go into litigation like this as unimportant given the larger picture. The day-to-day activity of the legal filings is mostly what interests me in this thread, so that's mostly what I post about. Coincidentally, I also think that's the part of litigation that Freedman is pretty terrible at. Freedman isn't involved in these Breen filings, but Breen is an appropriate stand in for him here ha. Freedman may be good at bullying and PR and maybe even depositions (let's see if that happens today), but he doesn't seem to be very good at motions practice or pleadings -- to me it's almost getting close to looking like malpractice at this point given his choice to file a worthless defamation claim that subjects his clients to treble damages, punitives, and attorneys fees as well as multiple various outstanding Rule 11 sanctions motions. I'm not sure Lively's attorneys will win on all of these, but I bet they will win some, and that's more cash Baldoni's rich benefactor will wind up paying out to Lively in this case.
Look, we all get it. The actual case for lively is such a train wreck and money pit that you need to focus on all the little filings here and there, and then of course the defamation claim. Baldoni doesn’t want money out of this, he wanted his reputation cleared and he has done that in spades. And yes, most people believe lively and the NYT won their cases because of fair report privilege, not because livelys claims were valid.
You’re acting like Baldoni started this and lost. Whereas, NO, Lively started this and although she seems to have avoided huge direct personal financial liability, she has decimated her reputation and is absolutely bleeding money. All for a pointless law suit that has done nothing but make her look like a manipulative liar. You can’t actually think that’s ‘winning’ can you?
How you can continuously come in here and claim the court case is going GREAT for Baldoni when he keeps losing motion after motion is bizarre to me. I guess since Freedman keeps going on TV saying he didn’t really lose at all or lost less then he really did keeps confusing people like you.
Let’s see how many claims are in the amended complaint Freedman files today as a starting point lol.
It had seemed to me that Baldoni had actually wanted quite a large sum of money out of this lawsuit since he filed a $400M defamation claim. But since those claims were dismissed as baseless I guess you’re rewriting history again.
Dp, but the recent discovery motions have been a mixed bag for Lively, she was forced to give up her claims for intentional I flictionof emotional distress and outright lost the Swift motion. She had some success in ipushing out the end dare on the other discovery and getting some responses to interrogatories.
Just a little reminder that another recent thing that happened in the case was Judge Liman dismissing every single one of Baldoni's claims, mostly with prejudice, on this day only two weeks ago. *pours out a forty for those $400M defamation and extortion claims RIP*
Well yes, but Lively has also lost some claims.
lol!! Voluntarily. Because she didn't want to give her alleged harasser her medical records. Not because her claims were legally insufficient. As all of Baldoni's claims were found to be. Baldoni was told none of his claims passed the smell test, whereas on the ED claim Lively just said "nah I'm good, you can have these back."
Let me fix this for you— Blake had no medical records to support her claims for intentional infliction of emotional distress and was forced to drop them.
Given the history we've seen in this case, where Gottlieb generally only files pleadings where he has the receipts to back them up whereas Freedman just files whatever hopes and dreams he wants despite their failure to conform to docket and pleadings requirements in federal courts, I'm going to go with Gottlieb here. Gottlieb's discovery requests may sometimes be overbroad or ask for too much, but he hasn't ever been caught out filing total nonsense like Freedman has now several times. So, no -- I'm pretty sure Lively had medical records to back up her emotional distress claims, but just didn't want to give them as ammunition to her alleged harasser and smearer to find them distorted in some Daily Mail article within the week. A++ decision, Gottlieb. Good call. And you can tell how good of a call it was by how hard Freedman fought to get the med records (rather than have the claims struck). Aww, poor Bryan.
This from the side that claimed Blake got everything she wanted with respect to attorney’s eyes protection in the protective order which does include medical records. Indeed, her attorneys specifically brought up medical records records in their oral argument.
Can’t have it both ways— everyone knows that Freedman can’t release anything marked AEO. Blake didn’t have the goods.
Nah, given that Johnny Depp used Amber Heard's medical records and the psych "expert" that he paid to argue to the jury that Heard had a host of mental illnesses including borderline personality disorder, this was just Gottlieb being smart. And if you don't think Freedman is feeding confidential information to news outlets and that's how they are publishing stories within minutes of hitting the docket, I have some beautiful bridges to sell you.
I haven't seen any news today on whether Lively's deposition actually did or did not happen.
Brett Douglass McDowell has now made his third filing of the day, this one a motion for reconsideration of the denial of his motion to intervene. It's not available via Court Listener, but I feel that is just as well.
In which case, don’t include the claims to begin with, or don’t seek a protective order for attorney’s eyes only treatment of medical records. I mean, you literally spent dozens of pages crowing about what a victory the protective order was for Blake. Now, when she can’t produce the goods, you try to blame it on lack of protection of the evidence. It’s laughable and pathetic.
I just don't think Gottlieb could have predicted that Freedman would have been this crazy or ridiculous for such a prolonged period of time. And this is Gottlieb, who is currently representing Drake in the biggest rap beef legal battle of all time, and having little problems with co-counsel there. While meanwhile the lawyer for Justin effin Baldoni is accusing co-counsel of extortion, filing multiple pleadings that get struck, and getting sanctions and attorneys fees motions filed against him lol. And Baldoni fans think the problem here is Michael Gottlieb, the guy that got Rudy Giuliani convicted of defamation against two poll workers before Liman and knows how to behave with this judge? Baldoni supporters have now been completely disconnected from reality for some time.
Is there a point in here somewhere or just more of your weird Freedman personalization babbling?
Gottlieb put in all the claims Lively had. Now that he has a full grasp on what a wackjob Freedman is, and how much money Lively already stands to gain through the treble damages etc. through 47.1 which were unforced errors on Freedman's part, they can take out the claims that would require them to trust Lively's harasser with her medical records.
It's really not the same thing as Baldoni getting his claims tossed by the judge. This was an internal and strategic decision. Freedman isn't getting to make many of those right now because all but two of his claims were taken away by the judge.
These are the TAG people who Lively offered to pay the costs of hosting and producing their docs to enable them to produce them, but later could not agree on terms and dates etc.
I thought a little fun thing about this is that his deadline is today, and he filed his letter after hours, at like 9:30 EST. His letter refers to a declaration and nine exhibits, which were not attached. So it was weird when nothing more got filed on the docket until about 15 minutes ago: The declaration!
So he and/or his paralegal have about 45 minutes to get those remaining 9 exhibits filed. Unless there is some lag between CourtListener and Pacer (I haven't noticed that before). Good luck Mr. Breed!
His letter seems pretty reasonable TBH.
I don’t think he’s correct that Lively’s offer to pay the costs of hosting and producing the docs for the production means that the requests as written were overbroad. I think it just means Lively wants a real production with metadata and not a bunch of screen shots of texts.
I do agree it’s overbroad to require texts on which parties are included, and thought Lively agreed not to include those. But then Breed also demanded nothing from after 12/2024 be produced! Liman has already agreed Lively should get communications from after the lawsuit was filed, from the party PR reps, anyway. So I think he’ll be required to produce the later tests.
How is Breed a partner, though? He has filed 9 exhibits showing different parts of the same email string that are all contained, I believe, in the single exhibit that Lively filed. That’s why the attorneys use the one email string over and over in a discovery dispute, so you can just use that one email as your exhibit. Now the judge’s clerk needs to go through these additional 9 exhibits for no reason when Breed could have just cited the already existing filing. Silly and unnecessary.
I also find Breed’s language about “We needn’t, any of us, play at saber rattling” etc to be a bit dramatic in here. Is he British or something? This is federal litigation and Liman has set hard discovery deadlines, with substantial completion due well before Breed’s 21 days would end. Less time on fancy language and more time on compliance would be helpful imho.
Home from end of school pool day with a special present from Judge Liman:
First of all, Lively filed a Reply to Breed's letter, saying hey just because we negotiated down what you might owe (for two months) and you kept asking for more at the last minute doesn't mean the initial subpoena was overburdensome and that having wasted our time for two months you shouldn't be made to comply in full with the subpoena as originally written, now. He notes that the Wayfarer parties (and in fact no parties) have yet produced any materials that provide either of these two people's communications, and the time that Lively might have had one or two months ago to piece together what had been provided by the third parties vs provided by Wayfarer etc. is now passed.
Gottlieb also mentions some juicy sounding emails in here on which these two were copied. The first footnote also side-eyes all nine attachments that Breed attached to his opposition as I noted above, explaining that they were just all the same document that Gottlieb et al had attached to their motion in the first place. He says: "evidence their participation in the retaliatory digital effort: in an email from Abel to Case, Koslow, Heath, and Nathan discussing whether TAG’s fee includes “social media mitigation and proactive fan posting to counter the narrative” (ECF No. 84 ¶ 225), in a text from Case to Matthew Mitchell, Nathan, and Abel regarding contents of “HR complaints” from set (id. ¶ 263), in a text from Abel to Mitchell, Nathan, Case, and Koslow discussing the need to “position” reported-upon HR complaints (id. ¶ 264), and in a text from Abel to Mitchell, Nathan, Case, and Koslow discussing an allegation that Baldoni “invited [a woman] up to his hotel room years ago,” and a text from Koslow in response suggesting to “chat to Jed as well on this” (id. ¶ 256). See Exhibit A (here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.363.1.pdf).
A big part of why the communications broke down on this document collection and production for these two third party TAG employees is because kind of at the last minute, Breen objected to producing docs "to the present" and insisted on stopping when the lawsuit was filed in December 2024. Breen says in the lawyer email chain that they objected to the date in their original objections, but if you look, they really did not. The paragraph with the date specification is "Instructions" paragraph 3, and Breen made no objection to that paragraph. Breen said from the very beginning that paragraphs 11 through 13 of the subpoena seemed reasonable and they could produce those documents, and paragraphs 11-13 even specifically state in the doc request itself that they'll require docs from May 2024 "to the present." Breen made no specific objection to the date range, and said in his email these requests were okay! It's only in the lawyer email communications in late-May/early-June that Breen suddenly objects to producing docs after the lawsuit was filed. In briefing this issue to Judge Liman, Breen doesn't really even try to argue that they objected to the date issue in their Responses and Objections, so while he tried that out on Bender he really didn't test it on the judge.
NAG is suggesting the prior production plan fell through because another Lively lawyer got on the email and rug pulled against the prior terms that had been worked out by Lively attorneys with Breed. This is just incorrect, because Kristen Bender is the Lively attorney who did most of the negotiating, and is on the last several email communications in this string working out the details. The reason communications broke down is in large part because Breed suddenly objected to producing anything after December 2024, out of the blue (and in fact also objects to producing anything between May and July 2024 as well), and that was not acceptable to Lively's attorneys. There is another issue in here about Breed also objecting to producing texts involving group communications involving any of the Baldoni parties, where Bender may have been willing to agree to this at first but after two months had passed with no docs from anyone, they determined they needed everything.
NAG is blaming the communication breakdown on Lively attorneys. While she's saying that's normal in litigation and isn't really a big deal, she's putting the blame for the sudden change on the wrong party. Breed wanted to limit the productions in two new ways at the last minute and Lively/Bender wasn't willing to move. But NAG puts the blame on Bender/Lively instead, which her fans will like more, but which isn't really correct imo.
The judge has already said that on the issue involving the smear, communications after December 2024 are relevant because Lively's complaint states that the smear is ongoing. So unless the judge decided a non-party shouldn't bear the burden here (and except to the extent that any of the third parties are no longer employed by TAG and wouldn't have communications from them to the present), the judge has already said those later docs would be relevant to the case. Order: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.355.0.pdf
Oh wow. Gottlieb is so brilliant, amirite?? You could tell he ‘side eyed’ someone in his footnotes?! Wow. Brilliant analysis. Thank god we have you to explain all this minutiae to us!!
What a great attorney. He encouraged, or at least didn’t discourage, his client who depends on her image for her living and her sense of being, to file a weak weak sexual harassment claim that would surely be put under a microscope and attacked as frivolous, put it in a California complaint so she could leak it to the NYT (risking a huge defamation claim, which she fortunately escaped) and then start engaging in a 2 + year litigation which will drag her name through the press constantly, and cost her millions and millions of dollars in legal fees and PR costs trying to rehabilitate her image. Plus she lost her prized relationship in Taylor Swift and is now isolated.
Wow! So awesome! What a great lawyer!!!! Let’s review how he side eyed someone in a footnote some more. Or focus on how she’s ‘winning’ because she escaped a defamation claim on a legal technicality.
Brilliant!!
Are you all right? I'm just talking about the filings that relate to the hearing coming up tomorrow. I guess you're saying that overall this lawsuit was bad for Lively, and I understand how you feel that way. On the other hand, your boy (I think he's surfing in Florida now?) just got all of his own claims dismissed. *poof* My favorite part of your point above is where you say his defamation claim was dismissed "on a legal technicality" lol. If that is how you need to cope, okay.
You seem to be dismissing all of the little back and forth letters and motions that go into litigation like this as unimportant given the larger picture. The day-to-day activity of the legal filings is mostly what interests me in this thread, so that's mostly what I post about. Coincidentally, I also think that's the part of litigation that Freedman is pretty terrible at. Freedman isn't involved in these Breen filings, but Breen is an appropriate stand in for him here ha. Freedman may be good at bullying and PR and maybe even depositions (let's see if that happens today), but he doesn't seem to be very good at motions practice or pleadings -- to me it's almost getting close to looking like malpractice at this point given his choice to file a worthless defamation claim that subjects his clients to treble damages, punitives, and attorneys fees as well as multiple various outstanding Rule 11 sanctions motions. I'm not sure Lively's attorneys will win on all of these, but I bet they will win some, and that's more cash Baldoni's rich benefactor will wind up paying out to Lively in this case.
Look, we all get it. The actual case for lively is such a train wreck and money pit that you need to focus on all the little filings here and there, and then of course the defamation claim. Baldoni doesn’t want money out of this, he wanted his reputation cleared and he has done that in spades. And yes, most people believe lively and the NYT won their cases because of fair report privilege, not because livelys claims were valid.
You’re acting like Baldoni started this and lost. Whereas, NO, Lively started this and although she seems to have avoided huge direct personal financial liability, she has decimated her reputation and is absolutely bleeding money. All for a pointless law suit that has done nothing but make her look like a manipulative liar. You can’t actually think that’s ‘winning’ can you?
How you can continuously come in here and claim the court case is going GREAT for Baldoni when he keeps losing motion after motion is bizarre to me. I guess since Freedman keeps going on TV saying he didn’t really lose at all or lost less then he really did keeps confusing people like you.
Let’s see how many claims are in the amended complaint Freedman files today as a starting point lol.
It had seemed to me that Baldoni had actually wanted quite a large sum of money out of this lawsuit since he filed a $400M defamation claim. But since those claims were dismissed as baseless I guess you’re rewriting history again.
Dp, but the recent discovery motions have been a mixed bag for Lively, she was forced to give up her claims for intentional I flictionof emotional distress and outright lost the Swift motion. She had some success in ipushing out the end dare on the other discovery and getting some responses to interrogatories.
Just a little reminder that another recent thing that happened in the case was Judge Liman dismissing every single one of Baldoni's claims, mostly with prejudice, on this day only two weeks ago. *pours out a forty for those $400M defamation and extortion claims RIP*
Well yes, but Lively has also lost some claims.
lol!! Voluntarily. Because she didn't want to give her alleged harasser her medical records. Not because her claims were legally insufficient. As all of Baldoni's claims were found to be. Baldoni was told none of his claims passed the smell test, whereas on the ED claim Lively just said "nah I'm good, you can have these back."
Let me fix this for you— Blake had no medical records to support her claims for intentional infliction of emotional distress and was forced to drop them.
Given the history we've seen in this case, where Gottlieb generally only files pleadings where he has the receipts to back them up whereas Freedman just files whatever hopes and dreams he wants despite their failure to conform to docket and pleadings requirements in federal courts, I'm going to go with Gottlieb here. Gottlieb's discovery requests may sometimes be overbroad or ask for too much, but he hasn't ever been caught out filing total nonsense like Freedman has now several times. So, no -- I'm pretty sure Lively had medical records to back up her emotional distress claims, but just didn't want to give them as ammunition to her alleged harasser and smearer to find them distorted in some Daily Mail article within the week. A++ decision, Gottlieb. Good call. And you can tell how good of a call it was by how hard Freedman fought to get the med records (rather than have the claims struck). Aww, poor Bryan.
This from the side that claimed Blake got everything she wanted with respect to attorney’s eyes protection in the protective order which does include medical records. Indeed, her attorneys specifically brought up medical records records in their oral argument.
Can’t have it both ways— everyone knows that Freedman can’t release anything marked AEO. Blake didn’t have the goods.
Nah, given that Johnny Depp used Amber Heard's medical records and the psych "expert" that he paid to argue to the jury that Heard had a host of mental illnesses including borderline personality disorder, this was just Gottlieb being smart. And if you don't think Freedman is feeding confidential information to news outlets and that's how they are publishing stories within minutes of hitting the docket, I have some beautiful bridges to sell you.
I haven't seen any news today on whether Lively's deposition actually did or did not happen.
Brett Douglass McDowell has now made his third filing of the day, this one a motion for reconsideration of the denial of his motion to intervene. It's not available via Court Listener, but I feel that is just as well.
In which case, don’t include the claims to begin with, or don’t seek a protective order for attorney’s eyes only treatment of medical records. I mean, you literally spent dozens of pages crowing about what a victory the protective order was for Blake. Now, when she can’t produce the goods, you try to blame it on lack of protection of the evidence. It’s laughable and pathetic.
I just don't think Gottlieb could have predicted that Freedman would have been this crazy or ridiculous for such a prolonged period of time. And this is Gottlieb, who is currently representing Drake in the biggest rap beef legal battle of all time, and having little problems with co-counsel there. While meanwhile the lawyer for Justin effin Baldoni is accusing co-counsel of extortion, filing multiple pleadings that get struck, and getting sanctions and attorneys fees motions filed against him lol. And Baldoni fans think the problem here is Michael Gottlieb, the guy that got Rudy Giuliani convicted of defamation against two poll workers before Liman and knows how to behave with this judge? Baldoni supporters have now been completely disconnected from reality for some time.
Is there a point in here somewhere or just more of your weird Freedman personalization babbling?
Gottlieb put in all the claims Lively had. Now that he has a full grasp on what a wackjob Freedman is, and how much money Lively already stands to gain through the treble damages etc. through 47.1 which were unforced errors on Freedman's part, they can take out the claims that would require them to trust Lively's harasser with her medical records.
It's really not the same thing as Baldoni getting his claims tossed by the judge. This was an internal and strategic decision. Freedman isn't getting to make many of those right now because all but two of his claims were taken away by the judge.
Lively is the plaintiff. She got to choose what to file, when to file and where to file. To drop claims for lack of evidence is a self own no matter how you try to spin it, which actually isn’t remote a coherent argument (“ Freedman bad … Amber Heard, Gottlieb represents Drake, so there” what?)
These are the TAG people who Lively offered to pay the costs of hosting and producing their docs to enable them to produce them, but later could not agree on terms and dates etc.
I thought a little fun thing about this is that his deadline is today, and he filed his letter after hours, at like 9:30 EST. His letter refers to a declaration and nine exhibits, which were not attached. So it was weird when nothing more got filed on the docket until about 15 minutes ago: The declaration!
So he and/or his paralegal have about 45 minutes to get those remaining 9 exhibits filed. Unless there is some lag between CourtListener and Pacer (I haven't noticed that before). Good luck Mr. Breed!
His letter seems pretty reasonable TBH.
I don’t think he’s correct that Lively’s offer to pay the costs of hosting and producing the docs for the production means that the requests as written were overbroad. I think it just means Lively wants a real production with metadata and not a bunch of screen shots of texts.
I do agree it’s overbroad to require texts on which parties are included, and thought Lively agreed not to include those. But then Breed also demanded nothing from after 12/2024 be produced! Liman has already agreed Lively should get communications from after the lawsuit was filed, from the party PR reps, anyway. So I think he’ll be required to produce the later tests.
How is Breed a partner, though? He has filed 9 exhibits showing different parts of the same email string that are all contained, I believe, in the single exhibit that Lively filed. That’s why the attorneys use the one email string over and over in a discovery dispute, so you can just use that one email as your exhibit. Now the judge’s clerk needs to go through these additional 9 exhibits for no reason when Breed could have just cited the already existing filing. Silly and unnecessary.
I also find Breed’s language about “We needn’t, any of us, play at saber rattling” etc to be a bit dramatic in here. Is he British or something? This is federal litigation and Liman has set hard discovery deadlines, with substantial completion due well before Breed’s 21 days would end. Less time on fancy language and more time on compliance would be helpful imho.
Home from end of school pool day with a special present from Judge Liman:
First of all, Lively filed a Reply to Breed's letter, saying hey just because we negotiated down what you might owe (for two months) and you kept asking for more at the last minute doesn't mean the initial subpoena was overburdensome and that having wasted our time for two months you shouldn't be made to comply in full with the subpoena as originally written, now. He notes that the Wayfarer parties (and in fact no parties) have yet produced any materials that provide either of these two people's communications, and the time that Lively might have had one or two months ago to piece together what had been provided by the third parties vs provided by Wayfarer etc. is now passed.
Gottlieb also mentions some juicy sounding emails in here on which these two were copied. The first footnote also side-eyes all nine attachments that Breed attached to his opposition as I noted above, explaining that they were just all the same document that Gottlieb et al had attached to their motion in the first place. He says: "evidence their participation in the retaliatory digital effort: in an email from Abel to Case, Koslow, Heath, and Nathan discussing whether TAG’s fee includes “social media mitigation and proactive fan posting to counter the narrative” (ECF No. 84 ¶ 225), in a text from Case to Matthew Mitchell, Nathan, and Abel regarding contents of “HR complaints” from set (id. ¶ 263), in a text from Abel to Mitchell, Nathan, Case, and Koslow discussing the need to “position” reported-upon HR complaints (id. ¶ 264), and in a text from Abel to Mitchell, Nathan, Case, and Koslow discussing an allegation that Baldoni “invited [a woman] up to his hotel room years ago,” and a text from Koslow in response suggesting to “chat to Jed as well on this” (id. ¶ 256). See Exhibit A (here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.363.1.pdf).
A big part of why the communications broke down on this document collection and production for these two third party TAG employees is because kind of at the last minute, Breen objected to producing docs "to the present" and insisted on stopping when the lawsuit was filed in December 2024. Breen says in the lawyer email chain that they objected to the date in their original objections, but if you look, they really did not. The paragraph with the date specification is "Instructions" paragraph 3, and Breen made no objection to that paragraph. Breen said from the very beginning that paragraphs 11 through 13 of the subpoena seemed reasonable and they could produce those documents, and paragraphs 11-13 even specifically state in the doc request itself that they'll require docs from May 2024 "to the present." Breen made no specific objection to the date range, and said in his email these requests were okay! It's only in the lawyer email communications in late-May/early-June that Breen suddenly objects to producing docs after the lawsuit was filed. In briefing this issue to Judge Liman, Breen doesn't really even try to argue that they objected to the date issue in their Responses and Objections, so while he tried that out on Bender he really didn't test it on the judge.
NAG is suggesting the prior production plan fell through because another Lively lawyer got on the email and rug pulled against the prior terms that had been worked out by Lively attorneys with Breed. This is just incorrect, because Kristen Bender is the Lively attorney who did most of the negotiating, and is on the last several email communications in this string working out the details. The reason communications broke down is in large part because Breed suddenly objected to producing anything after December 2024, out of the blue (and in fact also objects to producing anything between May and July 2024 as well), and that was not acceptable to Lively's attorneys. There is another issue in here about Breed also objecting to producing texts involving group communications involving any of the Baldoni parties, where Bender may have been willing to agree to this at first but after two months had passed with no docs from anyone, they determined they needed everything.
NAG is blaming the communication breakdown on Lively attorneys. While she's saying that's normal in litigation and isn't really a big deal, she's putting the blame for the sudden change on the wrong party. Breed wanted to limit the productions in two new ways at the last minute and Lively/Bender wasn't willing to move. But NAG puts the blame on Bender/Lively instead, which her fans will like more, but which isn't really correct imo.
The judge has already said that on the issue involving the smear, communications after December 2024 are relevant because Lively's complaint states that the smear is ongoing. So unless the judge decided a non-party shouldn't bear the burden here (and except to the extent that any of the third parties are no longer employed by TAG and wouldn't have communications from them to the present), the judge has already said those later docs would be relevant to the case. Order: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.355.0.pdf
Oh wow. Gottlieb is so brilliant, amirite?? You could tell he ‘side eyed’ someone in his footnotes?! Wow. Brilliant analysis. Thank god we have you to explain all this minutiae to us!!
What a great attorney. He encouraged, or at least didn’t discourage, his client who depends on her image for her living and her sense of being, to file a weak weak sexual harassment claim that would surely be put under a microscope and attacked as frivolous, put it in a California complaint so she could leak it to the NYT (risking a huge defamation claim, which she fortunately escaped) and then start engaging in a 2 + year litigation which will drag her name through the press constantly, and cost her millions and millions of dollars in legal fees and PR costs trying to rehabilitate her image. Plus she lost her prized relationship in Taylor Swift and is now isolated.
Wow! So awesome! What a great lawyer!!!! Let’s review how he side eyed someone in a footnote some more. Or focus on how she’s ‘winning’ because she escaped a defamation claim on a legal technicality.
Brilliant!!
Are you all right? I'm just talking about the filings that relate to the hearing coming up tomorrow. I guess you're saying that overall this lawsuit was bad for Lively, and I understand how you feel that way. On the other hand, your boy (I think he's surfing in Florida now?) just got all of his own claims dismissed. *poof* My favorite part of your point above is where you say his defamation claim was dismissed "on a legal technicality" lol. If that is how you need to cope, okay.
You seem to be dismissing all of the little back and forth letters and motions that go into litigation like this as unimportant given the larger picture. The day-to-day activity of the legal filings is mostly what interests me in this thread, so that's mostly what I post about. Coincidentally, I also think that's the part of litigation that Freedman is pretty terrible at. Freedman isn't involved in these Breen filings, but Breen is an appropriate stand in for him here ha. Freedman may be good at bullying and PR and maybe even depositions (let's see if that happens today), but he doesn't seem to be very good at motions practice or pleadings -- to me it's almost getting close to looking like malpractice at this point given his choice to file a worthless defamation claim that subjects his clients to treble damages, punitives, and attorneys fees as well as multiple various outstanding Rule 11 sanctions motions. I'm not sure Lively's attorneys will win on all of these, but I bet they will win some, and that's more cash Baldoni's rich benefactor will wind up paying out to Lively in this case.
Look, we all get it. The actual case for lively is such a train wreck and money pit that you need to focus on all the little filings here and there, and then of course the defamation claim. Baldoni doesn’t want money out of this, he wanted his reputation cleared and he has done that in spades. And yes, most people believe lively and the NYT won their cases because of fair report privilege, not because livelys claims were valid.
You’re acting like Baldoni started this and lost. Whereas, NO, Lively started this and although she seems to have avoided huge direct personal financial liability, she has decimated her reputation and is absolutely bleeding money. All for a pointless law suit that has done nothing but make her look like a manipulative liar. You can’t actually think that’s ‘winning’ can you?
How you can continuously come in here and claim the court case is going GREAT for Baldoni when he keeps losing motion after motion is bizarre to me. I guess since Freedman keeps going on TV saying he didn’t really lose at all or lost less then he really did keeps confusing people like you.
Let’s see how many claims are in the amended complaint Freedman files today as a starting point lol.
It had seemed to me that Baldoni had actually wanted quite a large sum of money out of this lawsuit since he filed a $400M defamation claim. But since those claims were dismissed as baseless I guess you’re rewriting history again.
Dp, but the recent discovery motions have been a mixed bag for Lively, she was forced to give up her claims for intentional I flictionof emotional distress and outright lost the Swift motion. She had some success in ipushing out the end dare on the other discovery and getting some responses to interrogatories.
Just a little reminder that another recent thing that happened in the case was Judge Liman dismissing every single one of Baldoni's claims, mostly with prejudice, on this day only two weeks ago. *pours out a forty for those $400M defamation and extortion claims RIP*
Well yes, but Lively has also lost some claims.
lol!! Voluntarily. Because she didn't want to give her alleged harasser her medical records. Not because her claims were legally insufficient. As all of Baldoni's claims were found to be. Baldoni was told none of his claims passed the smell test, whereas on the ED claim Lively just said "nah I'm good, you can have these back."
Let me fix this for you— Blake had no medical records to support her claims for intentional infliction of emotional distress and was forced to drop them.
Given the history we've seen in this case, where Gottlieb generally only files pleadings where he has the receipts to back them up whereas Freedman just files whatever hopes and dreams he wants despite their failure to conform to docket and pleadings requirements in federal courts, I'm going to go with Gottlieb here. Gottlieb's discovery requests may sometimes be overbroad or ask for too much, but he hasn't ever been caught out filing total nonsense like Freedman has now several times. So, no -- I'm pretty sure Lively had medical records to back up her emotional distress claims, but just didn't want to give them as ammunition to her alleged harasser and smearer to find them distorted in some Daily Mail article within the week. A++ decision, Gottlieb. Good call. And you can tell how good of a call it was by how hard Freedman fought to get the med records (rather than have the claims struck). Aww, poor Bryan.
This from the side that claimed Blake got everything she wanted with respect to attorney’s eyes protection in the protective order which does include medical records. Indeed, her attorneys specifically brought up medical records records in their oral argument.
Can’t have it both ways— everyone knows that Freedman can’t release anything marked AEO. Blake didn’t have the goods.
Nah, given that Johnny Depp used Amber Heard's medical records and the psych "expert" that he paid to argue to the jury that Heard had a host of mental illnesses including borderline personality disorder, this was just Gottlieb being smart. And if you don't think Freedman is feeding confidential information to news outlets and that's how they are publishing stories within minutes of hitting the docket, I have some beautiful bridges to sell you.
I haven't seen any news today on whether Lively's deposition actually did or did not happen.
Brett Douglass McDowell has now made his third filing of the day, this one a motion for reconsideration of the denial of his motion to intervene. It's not available via Court Listener, but I feel that is just as well.
In which case, don’t include the claims to begin with, or don’t seek a protective order for attorney’s eyes only treatment of medical records. I mean, you literally spent dozens of pages crowing about what a victory the protective order was for Blake. Now, when she can’t produce the goods, you try to blame it on lack of protection of the evidence. It’s laughable and pathetic.
I just don't think Gottlieb could have predicted that Freedman would have been this crazy or ridiculous for such a prolonged period of time. And this is Gottlieb, who is currently representing Drake in the biggest rap beef legal battle of all time, and having little problems with co-counsel there. While meanwhile the lawyer for Justin effin Baldoni is accusing co-counsel of extortion, filing multiple pleadings that get struck, and getting sanctions and attorneys fees motions filed against him lol. And Baldoni fans think the problem here is Michael Gottlieb, the guy that got Rudy Giuliani convicted of defamation against two poll workers before Liman and knows how to behave with this judge? Baldoni supporters have now been completely disconnected from reality for some time.
Is there a point in here somewhere or just more of your weird Freedman personalization babbling?
Gottlieb put in all the claims Lively had. Now that he has a full grasp on what a wackjob Freedman is, and how much money Lively already stands to gain through the treble damages etc. through 47.1 which were unforced errors on Freedman's part, they can take out the claims that would require them to trust Lively's harasser with her medical records.
It's really not the same thing as Baldoni getting his claims tossed by the judge. This was an internal and strategic decision. Freedman isn't getting to make many of those right now because all but two of his claims were taken away by the judge.
Lively is the plaintiff. She got to choose what to file, when to file and where to file. To drop claims for lack of evidence is a self own no matter how you try to spin it, which actually isn’t remote a coherent argument (“ Freedman bad … Amber Heard, Gottlieb represents Drake, so there” what?)
DP this poster will just spin and spin, dumping the thread with procedural back and forth and crowing over victories that don’t mean much. When she’s not fantasizing about Freedman. Lively started this mess and all signs so far point to her having nothing to show for it.
As part of this motion, she argues the baselessness on which Freedman based all of his claims against Sloane: "On June 4, 2025, Daily Mail reporter James Vituscka confirmed, contrary to the Wayfarer Parties’ key allegation that Ms. Sloane told him “that Blake was ‘sexually assaulted,’” ECF No. 50 ¶ 193, that 'Ms. Sloane never told [Vituscka] that Ms. Lively was sexually harassed or sexually assaulted by Justin Baldoni or anyone else.' ECF No. 286-1 ¶ 5. Vituscka also confirmed that the Wayfarer Parties did not conduct even a cursory investigation into their claims before recklessly dragging Ms. Sloane into this litigation and the surrounding media firestorm that they fueled. Id. ¶ 6. By the Wayfarer Parties’ own admission, any claim that Lively was 'sexually assaulted' in the way their complaints implied is 'an unsubstantiated accusation that not even Lively had gone so far as to claim.' ECF No. 50 ¶ 193. It is simply unbelievable that any Wayfarer Party (or any counsel that drafted that allegation or signed those pleadings before filing) believed in good faith that Ms. Sloane indeed made such an accusation."
Sloane also refers to Freedman's various promises that he had come upon additional proof to substantiate his claims and would amend his complaint, but notes his complete failure to ever do so as well as their utter failure to produce any documents on which they intended to rely in filing any amended complaint.
It's possible that this was received by Sloane as part of the deal she made with Vituscka to receive his texts from Freedman (it's unclear). Of this text, in the motion, she says: "As further evidence that the allegations attributed to him were unreliable, Vituscka explicitly instructed Bryan Freedman not to reference him or the Daily Mail in support of the Wayfarer Parties’ complaint. See Exhibit A (undated Vituscka text with Wayfarer Parties’ counsel Bryan Freedman)."
Declaration from Leslie Sloane saying she never told Vituscka that Lively was sexually assaulted by Baldoni or anyone else and that "As result of the Wayfarer Parties’ meritless claims against me, I have received an onslaught of public ridicule and intimidating messages. My involvement in this litigation has caused me severe emotional, physical, and professional damage.": https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304/gov.uscourts.nysd.634304.372.0.pdf
Sloane seeks $1.3M in attorneys fees and approximately $40K in costs.
But sure, now that Baldoni is facing down another potential big big price tag on having brought baseless claims against the Lively parties and losing them, let's talk more about how Lively voluntarily withdrawing her emotional distress claims is even worse than Baldoni getting all his claims dismissed because Lively got to choose when and where to sue lolol.
Vituscka’w text says don’t put me in the lawsuit because it would be bad for my career. It literally says nothing about his statement being false. It does however, suggest he’s a man who would change his testimony to avoid testifying in court.
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